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"Trumpocalypse: Can Writing Books Help Save a Seriously F*cked World?”

Four writers and a renowned book editor discuss the role of books and those who write them in such desperate times as these. Is it worth writing books? If so, what kinds of books? If not, what shall we writers do with ourselves for the duration?

Melissa Chadburn has written for NYTBR, Buzzfeed, Poets & Writers, American Public Media’s Marketplace, and dozens other places. She is a contributing editor for TheEconomic Hardship Reporting Project. She is Editor-At-Large for DAME Magazine. Her essay, “The Throwaways,” received notable mention in Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.

Daniel Smetankahas worked in the publishing industry for twenty-five years. As an Executive Editor at Ballantine/Random House, Inc., his list included books by Elizabeth Rosner, Thomas Steinbeck, and Dan Chaon, a 2001 Finalist for the National Book Award. He is currently Vice President, Executive Editor for Counterpoint Press. His projects include works by Dana Johnson, Abby Geni, Tod Goldberg, Natashia Deon, Joan Silber, Cristina Garcia, Alan Lightman, and Karen E. Bender, a 2015 Finalist for the National Book Award.

Cindy Chupack has won two Emmys and three Golden Globes as a TV writer/producer whose credits include “Divorce,” “Better Things,” “Modern Family,” “Sex and the City,” “Everybody Loves Raymond,” and most recently the darkly comic Showtime hour “I’m Dying Up Here” about standup comics in Los Angeles in the 70s. This year she directed an episode of “I’m Dying Up Here," which marked her television directing debut, and she also directed her first feature this summer in New York, a story about mothers and their adult sons called OTHERHOOD (starring Angela Bassett, Felicity Huffman, and Patricia Arquette.) The film will be released next Mother’s Day on Netflix. Cindy is also the author of two comic memoirs: the New York Times bestseller The Between Boyfriends Book: A Collection of Cautiously Hopeful Essays, and The Longest Date: Life as a Wife.

Natashia Deón is a 2018-2019 LA Times Book Award Judge for Fiction and Debut Fiction, a 2017 NAACP Image Award Nominee and author of the critically acclaimed novel, Grace (Counterpoint Press), which garnered the Image Award nomination, the 2017 American Library Association, Black Caucus Award Winner for Best Debut Fiction, was named a New York Times Top Book 2016, a Kirkus Review Best Book of 2016, a Book Riot, The Root, and Entropy Magazine Favorite Book of 2016. A practicing criminal attorney, law professor, and UCLA creative writing professor, Deón is a recipient of a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Riverside—Palm Desert. Her writing has appeared in Lenny, American Short Fiction, Buzzfeed, LA Review of Books, The Feminist Wire, Asian American Lit Review, Rattling Wall and other places.

Meredith Maran is the author of The New Old Me, Why We Write, a dozen other nonfiction books and an acclaimed novel. She writes features, op-eds, essays, and book reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and Salon. A freelance book editor described by Anne Lamott as “The absolute best in the biz,” Meredith has been a Writer in Residence at UCLA and several artists’ colonies including MacDowell and Yaddo. A member of the National Book Critics Circle and a passionate proponent of independent presses, bookstores, and thought, Meredith lives in an historic bungalow in Silver Lake, Los Angeles.